For most individuals, being aware of, and monitoring, the state of their finances and tracking their overall financial situation or “financial health” has always been an extremely important and fundamental responsibility. Unfortunately, due to a lack of time, limits of currently available resources, and in some instances, a lack of motivation, many individuals have historically failed to recognize and accept this responsibility. However, recent economic events have reminded many individuals of the urgent need to know, and monitor, the state of their finances and financial health.
Several computing system implemented financial management systems are currently available to help an individual, or an authorized user on behalf of an individual, gather an individual's own financial data and/or process/analyze that individual's own financial data. Typically, these currently available computing system implemented financial management systems provide an individual/user with financial data such as, but not limited to, the individual's overall financial position data, the individual's income data, the individual's expense data, and the individual's transactional data, all directed solely to the individual's own situation and/or activities. However, many, if not most, individuals desire, and/or would significantly benefit from, data indicating how the given individual's financial data and/or financial position compares with the financial data and/or financial position associated with similarly situated individuals.
In addition, some currently available computing system implemented financial management systems provide users limited and highly generalized financial statistics and/or recommendations/guidelines. However, the highly generalized statistics and/or recommendations/guidelines, at least those available at a relatively reasonable cost, are often of limited value to the user since the statistics and/or recommendations/guidelines are based on general spending assumptions and overly broad groupings that do not necessarily apply to the individual's specific financial situation, the individual's specific financial data, or the given individual's peers. Consequently, the currently available generalized “rule of thumb” statistics and/or recommendations/guidelines usually fail to provide the user/individual with any truly useful data, or the necessary motivation to modify their spending habits in order to establish more sound financial practices.
On the other hand, any specifically customized financial analysis and/or recommendations/guidelines are often expensive, and time consuming, to obtain and this advice still typically fails to show a user how the individual's specific financial data compares with the actual financial data of similarly situated individuals. In addition, specifically customized financial analysis reports are typically lengthy and detailed reports that include text and data presented in a format that is time consuming to review, difficult to understand, and otherwise not particularly user friendly or helpful to individuals who desire to visualize their relative financial health displayed in a clear and concise manner.
As a result of the situation described above, many individuals have no idea how their financial situation really compares to similarly situated individuals. Consequently, using currently available computing system implemented financial management systems, individuals fail to benefit from comparative analysis and the “wisdom of the masses” that has become available with the advent of the Internet, improved processing power, and improved data storage.